K-romance Pavane (now on Netflix) is named after a slow-paced dance popularized during the European Renaissance period. It’s an apt metaphor for the movie’s central relationship, which progresses so slowly, it’d lose a race with a snail tugging an ocean liner behind it. Director Lee Jong-pil adapts Park Min-gyu’s novel Pavane for a Dead Princess, about three 20-somethings in Seoul contending with their various emotional blockades while working at a large department store. Go Ah-sung (Snowpiercer, The Host), Byun Yo-han and Moon Sang-min lend their talents to a trio of characters whose charismatic deficits seem difficult to translate to the screen.
The Gist: Kyung-rok (Moon) grew up the son of a famous TV actor who kept his family a secret, and the result is a young adult who’s a boundless mope. He gets a crummy job in the parking garage of Utopia, a multi-level department store. Light years more outgoing is his co-worker Yo-han (Byun), who notices Kyung-rok’s David Bowie T-shirt and shows off his own, and declares them friends. During a down moment at work – of which there seem to be many – Kyung-rok borrows Yo-han’s skateboard and zooms through the parking ramp and storage room, which has a motion-sensor light that seems to stay lit for as long as it detects depths of character personality. Which is to say it stays on for about 12 seconds every time Kyung-rok triggers it.
Kyung-rok rolls past a female co-worker hiding her intense eyes and frizzy hair behind a cardboard standee of a smiling blonde Caucasian woman. He seems… “enamored” isn’t the right word. One can’t imagine him ever being enamored by anything, such are the length and frequency of his long, blank stares at the ground or into the empty, empty night. Maybe he’s “interested.” Or “not quite shrugging it off like he does everything else.” Yo-han tells him that said co-worker is dubbed Dinosaur because everyone reacts to her off-putting facade like they just saw a dinosaur: you know, YEAGGH. Yo-han insists Kyung-rok have beers with him, then Kyung-rok goes home to eat a sad microwaved dinner and feed a stray outdoor cat he seems to have half-adopted. He “seems” to do everything, because “seems” implies a lack of investment or emotional commitment. That also explains why he seems to half-do everything. The guy’s just vague, is my point.
Kyung-rok soon talks to Dinosaur, and learns her name is Mi-jung (Go). She seems shocked that someone wants to talk to her, because she also “seems” to do everything. Birds of a feather, perhaps. He helps her with tasks and they eventually get past their long, drawn-out silences and thaw each other a bit, the equivalent of lazily waving a match in the general direction of a glacier. Yo-han gets the two of them at the same table with beers on the table, hoping to jumpstart something. He’s more outgoing, and has a rapport with three Conventionally Hot Girls at work, one of whom, Se-ra (Lee Yi-dam), shows interest in Kyung-rok – and bafflement that he’d prefer the troll-girl who fetches packages from the basement for her. Eventually, Mi-jung and Kyung-rok work their way up to having conversations, and going for a walk, even stopping at a record store to spin old-timey songs in the listening station. It’s cute, but they’re painfully timid. At this rate, they might smooch each other some time around the heat death of the universe.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? I prefer the more uptempo YA K-drama Love Untangled.
Performance Worth Watching: Go’s performance is the only one afforded opportunities to show nuance and depth of character – to the point where you wish Mi-jung was the primary protagonist.
Our Take: Pavane is such a strange, meandering, shallow movie. It believes long, drawn-out silences are profound, but fails to recognize that they’re mostly dull, considering the characters moping their way through them aren’t developed to the point where we can suss out what they’re thinking behind their Droopy-dog mugs. We know the sparest of details about Kyung-rok, his background (bad dad stuff) and yearnings (he wants to be a hoity-toity school-for-the-arts dancer), and even less about Mi-jung. Our understanding of these characters is foggy enough that it’s hard to discern why, for example, Mi-jung quickly bundles up her food and leaves the moment Kyung-rok sits next to her at lunch – it’s just a calculated quirk dictated by a screenplay that wants to play Games of Yearning and paint a broad, cartoonish portrait of antisocial behavior that rarely resembles the actions of a real human being.
I appreciate how Pavane tends to push against the formula of standard romance and rom-coms – for every time a character, say, makes a compulsive last-second decision to dash down the street after their romantic interest and declare their love, there are a dozen instances where they defy our expectations. But merely defying expectations doesn’t make the movie interesting. Its primary goal seems to be developing oddball romantic tension that fizzles and sputters more than it gives us a firm grip on what Mi-jung and Kyung-rok are truly thinking or feeling. Obviously, they feel so socially paralyzed that any grand emotional proclamations are buried beneath dozens of layers of crippling self-awareness that one needs a healthy application of C-4 to bust through.
The film moves slowly without the deliberation to propel our interest. Occasionally, Lee deploys a clever edit or transition to inspire a laugh, because nothing his terminally navel-gazing characters do is particularly funny. A love story about inexpressive, withdrawn saddos has so much potential – it could lead to a heartening breakthrough, a change for the better that inspires a little hope for people who are, or at least feel like, outcasts. But Kyung-rok and Mi-jung are stuck in a movie that doesn’t seem interested in defining the parameters of their mutual desire, forcing them to exist on the shifting sands of our frustration. And the ending they find themselves in is a maddening reiteration of the old notion that you should say what needs to be said now before the opportunity’s gone. Don’t forget, the heat death of the universe is right around the corner.
Our Call: This long slow dance goes nowhere. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
